Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• They Cloned Her Voice, Then Claimed Her Songs: AI Music Scams Are Using Copyright Law as a Weapon Against Real Artists: From a folk singer demonetized by her own deepfakes to a fake AI ‘artist’ holding 11 iTunes chart slots, the infrastructure meant to protect artists is now being weaponized against them. (Vinyl Culture)
• Your Power Tools Got Worse On Purpose: How TTI and Stanley Black & Decker took the same playbook in opposite directions. (Worse on Purpose)
• US states drop Medicaid coverage of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs as demand rises: Experts say any short-term financial benefit will be outweighed by long-term health costs related to obesity. (The Guardian)
• $30m an hour: big oil reaping huge war windfall from consumers, analysis finds: Climate action blockers including Saudi Arabia, Russia and major fossil fuel firms set to make extra $234bn by end of 2026. The world’s top oil companies are banking $30 million every hour in unearned profit from the US-Israeli conflict in Iran. War is hell — unless you’re an oil executive. (The Guardian) see also Wars Impose Lasting Economic Costs, While More Defense Spending Means Hard Choices: The IMF quantifies what should be obvious: war is expensive, the bill lasts for decades, and every defense dollar is a dollar not spent elsewhere. Economics for hawks. While More Defense Spending Means Hard Choices: Rising defense spending requires difficult fiscal choices to avoid raising vulnerabilities, while post-war recovery hinges on policies to reduce uncertainty, rebuild capital, and help displaced people return home (IMF Blog)
• The Neo-Nazi Enforcer Who Helped Build Peter Thiel’s Online Influence Empire: A reported investigation into the uglier corners of the Thiel-funded tech-political ecosystem. Pair it with anything else you are reading about the billionaire class. New Epstein-linked revelations show how neo-Nazi operative Andrew Auernheimer became a crucial link between Peter Thiel and the online far-right subcultures waging ‘memetic warfare’ against their enemies. (Byline Times)
• The Profession That Does Not Exist: Writing won’t make you a living: Today, by some estimates, the average freelance journalist is paid around $0.25 to $0.50 per word, and at the highest-paying glossies, rates have hovered around $2 per word for more than a decade, even as inflation has diminished the purchasing power of that seemingly handsome fee. A symposium on the vanishing middle class of professional writers. The headline is tongue-in-cheek, the data behind it is not. (The Baffler)
• Government Workers Say They’re Getting Inundated With Religion “This has never happened before.” From Easter emails to entire-agency sermons, federal workers report a rising tide of religious messaging from political appointees. The separation of church and state is looking increasingly theoretical. (Wired)
• Could a former Brazilian model be the whistleblower Melania is afraid of? The First Lady’s unprecedented public statement about Jeffrey Epstein yesterday raised a lot of questions about what, if anything, is about to be revealed about Donald and Melania Trump’s relationship with the late sex trafficker. The Epstein case had quieted down in the wake of Trump’s decision to attack Iran — some critics allege that was one of Trump’s goals in launching a war in the first place — to cool the MAGA furor over DOJ’s inept release of the Epstein files. Now it seems that plan, if true, has led to a Jack-In-The-Beanstalk effect — as in trading a cow for beans and climbing into danger without really thinking it through. The investigative journalist who broke Epstein follows a trail from Mar-a-Lago to São Paulo. Whatever Melania’s hiding, someone knows. (Julie K. Brown)
• An Oligarchy of Old People: How elderly Americans amassed disproportionate wealth and power. Gerontocracy isn’t just an American problem — it’s a feature of concentrated power everywhere. When wealth and authority accumulate with age, generational change becomes nearly impossible. (The Atlantic) see also Trump’s mental state is in decline – and it’s time we talked about it: The question everyone in Washington whispers but nobody says out loud. At some point, the emperor’s cognitive decline becomes a national security issue. Increasingly incoherent speeches, a highly volatile temperament and brazen narcissism. The president’s behaviour is much easier to understand, writes Alan Rusbridger, if we all come to terms with one thing (Independent)
• Tennis has a merch problem—and it’s bigger than one stolen design: Pro tennis has always struggled to commercialize its fanbase. The design theft scandal is just the latest symptom of an industry that hasn’t figured out its own brand. An illustrator’s work appearing on Monte-Carlo Masters merchandise without permission points to a deeper issue: tennis’s fragmented retail system leaves no one clearly in charge. (Hard Court)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with Philippe Bouchaud, co‑founder, chair & head of research/chief scientist at Capital Fund Management (CFM). The $20 billion firm specializes in managed futures. He began his career in theoretical physics, was awarded the IBM Young Scientist Prize (1990) and the C.N.R.S. Silver Medal (1996), and has published over 300 scientific papers and several books in physics and finance.
Where measles is spreading in the U.S.: Outbreaks fuel infections in states coast to coast
Source: Health Beat
Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.
~~~
To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.
